I launched the site in January of 2012 as a way to preserve the sounds made famous by my favorite old technologies and electronics equipment. For instance, the textured rattle and hum of a VHS tape being sucked into the womb of a 1983 JVC HR-7100 VCR. As you probably know, it’s a wonderfully complex sound, subtle yet unfiltered. But, as streaming playback becomes more common in the US, and as people in developing nations like Canada and the UK get brought up to DVD players, it’s likely that the world will have seen and heard the last of older machines like the HR-7100.

Hopefully the answer will be uncovered before residents’ grip on sanity reaches the breaking point. Via CBC News:

A federally funded report on the Windsor Hum has been submitted to both the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Natural Resources Canada. For years, residents in west Windsor and neighbouring LaSalle have been complaining of a mysterious rumble or hum.

Both ministries are reviewing the results of the $60,000 report, said the University of Windsor’s Colin Novak, one of the authors of the report. The final review has not yet been conducted.

Officials are trying to arrange a meeting between the ministries and researchers, including Novak and the University of Western Ontario’s Peter Brown.

In 2012, a different federal study suggested the hum may originate from the U.S. side of the Detroit River, in the general area of Zug Island, an area of concentrated steel production and manufacturing.

Using the microphones and speakers that come standard in many of today’s laptop computers and mobile devices, hackers can secretly transmit and receive data using high-frequency audio signals that are mostly inaudible to human ears, a new study shows.

Michael Hanspach and Michael Goetz, researchers at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing, and Ergonomics, recently performed a proof-of-concept experiment that showed that “covert acoustical networking,” a technique which had been hypothesized but considered improbable by most experts, is indeed possible.

Yahoo! News on the continuing saga of the sound that defies explanation:

It’s known as the Hum, a steady, droning sound that’s heard in places as disparate as Taos, N.M.; Bristol, England; and Largs, Scotland. What causes the Hum, and why it only affects a small percentage of the population in certain areas, remain a mystery, despite a number of scientific investigations.

Reports started trickling in during the 1950s from people who had never heard anything unusual before; suddenly, they were bedeviled by an annoying, low-frequency humming, throbbing or rumbling sound. The cases seem to have several factors in common: Generally, the Hum is only heard indoors, and it’s louder at night than during the day.

Only about 2 percent of the people living in any given Hum-prone area can hear the sound, and most of them are ages 55 to 70, according to a 2003 study. Most of the people who hear the Hum (sometimes referred to as “hearers” or “hummers”) describe the sound as similar to a diesel engine idling nearby.

Researchers are prepared to uncover the truth behind the ominous sound haunting a city, Michigan Radio reports:

Researchers in Ontario will spend the coming months trying to get to the bottom of the noise and vibration known as the “Windsor Hum.” People in Windsor have complained about the low-frequency rumbling for the past two years.

“What we’re attempting to do is pinpoint the source…but also understand how it might affect quality of life for the people of this region,” said Bob Dechert, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Ottawa.

Windsor city Councillor Drew Dilkens says he knows of one resident who recently sold his house to get away from the hum. One study has already suggested the hum might be coming from near Zug Island, which sits in the Detroit River on the U.S. side of the border.

Say what you will about 2012, but since consciousness is comprised of linguistic information, the idea of a coming apocalypse in itself propagated some rather delicious undercurrents of sound rippling through the Akashic record this year. I’ve never written more than a top five list in my life, but when I was thinking back on the insane amount of mind-bending albums that dropped in the last 12 months, I was kind of in shock. Most of this stuff’s fairly obvious, at least in my world. Was it people like Terence McKenna and his mechanized Timewave Zero prophesies, inspiring people like Grant Morrison to write the great Invisibles hypersigil, that summoned this record deluge of psychoactive soundscapes into motion? I have no idea. Did the Mayans get in every band’s head and subconsciously encourage them to bring their A game in 2012 as it might be their final chance?

In the early 1970s, a group of hunters in the Sierra-Nevada Mountains captured sounds of an alleged encounter with Bigfoot. Now a professor and former Navy crypto-linguist says he has analyzed the strange audio recordings, and claims that they not only are legitimate, but reveal a primitive, grunt-based language. Decide for yourself -- either way, the Sasquatch sounds on the tape are disturbing:

Two weeks ago, passersby noticed a haunting humming seemingly originating from the still-unfinished Freedom Tower. One possible explanation is that the the strong winds of Hurricane Sandy vibrated the metal beams at the top of the structure, turning them into musical instruments:

The senses are more intermingled than we realize — what we hear influences what we think we see, Live Science writes:

Some people may actually see sounds, say researchers who found this odd ability is possible when the parts of the brain devoted to vision are small.

Scientists took a closer look at the sound-induced flash illusion. When a single flash is followed by two bleeps, people sometimes also see two illusory consecutive flashes. They found the smaller a person’s visual cortex was — the part of the brain linked with vision — the more likely he or she experienced the illusion. On average, the volunteers saw the illusion 62 percent of the time.

“The visual brain’s representation of what hits the eye is very efficient but not perfect — there is some uncertainty to visual representations, especially when things happen quickly, like the rapid succession of flashes in the illusion,” de Haas said.

Julie Schickling stood out on her porch in West Seattle just after midnight because she couldn’t explain what she was hearing. So she recorded the sound. “It gets high and lower, and goes away, then comes back,” said Schickling.

Some of her neighbors report being shaken out of bed by the low rumble, also described as a growl. In fact, as many people you talk with is about how many different words you heard to describe it. “It is kind of creepy,” Kay Kirkpatrick, the West Seattle resident said of the sound. “It creeps you out a little bit.”

Some long time residents say they’ve heard this sound before over the years. Others say it’s the first encounter they’ve had with the eerie noise.